You know you’ve crossed a few lines when you find your garden full of an unholy mixture of pallets, static caravans and knackered old cars with only one lock working. (Let us not speak of the repair bills we’ve forked out this year on Quercus’s sensible car, the car which replaced the avowedly not sensible Citröen CX, which cost a fraction of what this bastard replacement has needed; it is all the fault of said “reliable” replacement that we have had, in the last few months, variously, a multi-coloured Ford Mondeo, a Peugeot 405, a people-carrier thing, and several other semi-buggered courtesy cars from the garage up the road.)

But when you then find yourself contemplating – seriously, I might add – the purchase of a van, you know you’re in trouble.

Yes folks: it looks like we’re going to sell the bollocking car and replace it with a van, size, description and specification thereof yet to be decided. I suppose it’s merely a part of accepting that generally, cars were not designed to haul tonnes of rubble about the place, and, in an ideal world, their lives don’t include queries about just how much timber you can get in the front, or whether the axle can take a concrete lintel without complaining.

We are pikies. It’s simple.

Some day, I really must rediscover the concept of a garden.

When my GP told me I could two and a half weeks off work because I was blatantly ill and exhausted, I felt like I’d been given the best present in the world: time. Time is what I always seem short of, these days – time to sleep, time to catch up on avoiding midden-esque status house-wise, time to give the small girl the sort of childhood I so want her to have (insert sickening images of wheat fields and kites, conkers and bonfires etc.) time to give Quercus the chance to finish work on various bits of renovation or construction, time to let him sleep, time to be awake and active and fun for the small girl, time to make dinner, to try to remember that if I look hard, I have still got a creative bone in my body. Time, in short, to do anything except wish I had more time.

Yet here I am, on the other side, and I feel as if I’m back at square one.

Of course, it’s all too predictable – I set myself sort of targets, when given any chunk of time; things which I will get done in that time, states of mind to which I will move in that time, levels of cleanliness or completion which will be achieved in that time. And then, if I don’t manage all of those states, I feel a bit rubbish about it, if I’m honest, which is about where I am now. I ended up having not two but three weeks off, which, added to the leave I’d already booked from work, means I’ve had about a month of freer time than normal. The things I really wanted to do were to see if Quercus going into the small girl at night would rejig our blatantly-not-working-yet-we-keep-doing-it-because-we-can’t-think-of-anything-else approach to her night-time wakings; we managed about a week of this (and it did seem to be helping; she goes back to sleep much more easily for him, and doesn’t expect feeds, of course, from the paternal bosom in the way which she – naturally enough – does from the maternal alternative) before she caught something horrible at a toddler group, and I simply hadn’t the heart to leave her to her daddy’s tender mercies (no matter how tender they truly are), when I knew that a feed and a cuddle from her mama would sort her out much more rapidly in this instance. So, cue a return to the original pattern – up a couple of times each night, much wailing if feeds were not offered, much knackeredness during the day on my part.

Then of course I caught the infection thing too – cue third course of antibiotics this year (and yes, I know they’re not very good for you, but I can’t see I have much choice, given that my immune system seems to be immune to nothing except a hard day’s work).

So, I went to Quercus’s mother, to escape the situation with the kitchen here (no work surfaces, constant dust and noise while Quercus worked his arse off to get the rest of the cupboards finished and fitted, over a very long period if working child-friendly hours) and to give him a decent working day which didn’t have to stop at five-thirty for the small girl’s tea and bedtime wind-down. And then the small girl had a bad bout of teething, and we got even less sleep, together with the normal frustrations of being away from home, under the weather, crabby and surrounded by constant – if well-meant and caring – twittering (and I mean that in its original sense).

So, here I am today. The kitchen is all but finished, which is a very good thing, but I am struggling once more with the constant sleep deprivation. The small girl is getting over whatever it is that she’s been fighting off, but is still a bit pathetic, and the normal activities I’d go for when she’s a bit listless but doesn’t really want to go out aren’t really on the cards because the worktops are covered in tung oil and thus not fit for small bottoms to sit on while baking is undertaken.

Part of me knows it’s rubbish to assess myself by standards of What I Have Done With This Time. I have read Naomi Stadlen’s excellent What Mothers Do, and I believe it wholeheartedly. Wholeheartedly. Except when applying it to myself, it appears. I so, so, so hoped that this time would just let me feel caught up. That the small girl would just sleep through the night on her own, without needing a parental nudge in that direction. That I would spend mornings in happy child-related chaos, and afternoons quietly knitting while the babe snoozed upstairs. This appears to be the day of mourning for the Month That Never Was.

The plus side:

The kitchen is so nearly done. There are cupboards, and I am putting things in them. The attic is half-empty as a result, as are the sheds.

I finished the small girl’s cardigan, and have started a second.

I bought lots of lovely beads and buttons at a shop in West Sussex while staying with Quercus’s mother; these are both playthings for the small girl, and objectively justifiable as crafty bits for me, which gets them extra points.

The not-quite-so-plus:

I’m still knackered, and I’m unutterably sad about it. I feel that this constant tiredness casts a shadow over what is in many ways the best (if hardest-work-requiring) time of my life. And I just don’t know what to do about it.

Tomorrow I go back to work. I’m dreading it, not because I loathe my job, but because, after a month of absence, people will probably ask how I’m doing, and, mostly if people ask that sort of thing, I cry, at the moment. I don’t want to do that. I also don’t feel ready to go back to that sense of treadmill which dominates the week when I’m too tired to be doing the things I have to do; it doesn’t take much for things to feel fine, but likewise, a few bad nights and I’m struggling.

I’m hoping that I just need to get a grip, and that, once the kitchen is genuinely finished, things will seem brighter. There is a list of things I need to do – tax-related stuff because of self-employed work, some copy-editing, booking the cats’ vaccinations – which is genuinely so daunting at the moment that I am employing tactics I developed during particularly  black patches on the PhD, evasion ploys which allow me to push unwanted information to one side, pigheadedly ignoring it until my mind thinks it might cope with it. The funny thing is, if I read someone else writing this sort of thing, I’d probably be saying ‘get some help! you clearly need it!’, but I still feel that this will pass, and I will be OK, and we will get there, and all the other things one normally chants at moments like this.

Ugh, in short. I think it’s time for some Earl Grey.

Yes, well, it appears that I may have temporarily broken my website. Technically, I hasten to add, it wasn’t that I actively did anything, but rather that I ignored both an email from my host which told me that they were going to upgrade the version of something deeply important to a new and more exciting incarnation (now with added sparkles!), and the constant pleas from WordPress to update from their paleolithic platform to something more contemporary. Who’d've thunk it, eh? Anyhoo, if you’ve stopped by in the last few days and seen lots of rather unhappy-looking code, that’ll be why.

Anyway, in other news, well, nothing much, really. We’ve had lots of snow, which was very pretty and meant three days of working from home, and we’ve now had lots of rain, which means business as normal for Devon, really. I am struggling to work up enthusiasm for anything at the moment, somehow, partly because I’ve got lots of loose ends which I really ought to weave into some semblance of order, and partly because the witchling is teething and we’re up a fair bit in the night once more, after nearly three weeks of unprompted, spontaneous, out-of-nowhere sleeping-entire-nights bliss. I have got plans and whatnot (as ever, being the paranoid soul I am) but I’m just sort of ‘meh’ about putting them into action. Is this Januaryitis, I wonder?

Anyway, as a bid to ease myself back into the proverbial (saddle, that is), I thought I would share some of the questions currently tormenting my tiny mind. Here they be:

1. How on earth do we persuade the cats that the newly-fitted, polished, and worked-on-to-within-an-inch-of-our-lives oak worktops are not seating places, nor scratching posts, nor (God forbid) extended hunting grounds for playing with mousies? I don’t want to have to shut them out all night – the cats, that is, rather than the mousies; they I am quite happy to shut out – but our catflap is in the kitchen door, and Quercus is getting a rather mad glint in his eye whenever he sees the cats within, say, a four-mile radius of that woodwork…

2. Why does having been hit by a van means oodles of paperwork for us? OODLES OF IT, I tell you. All to be returned in seven days. Shite.

3. How does anyone find technology interesting? I have just spent about three months (well, in active terms, about half an hour) agonising over external hard-drives. Of course, because I’ve got a Mac, I’m looking at about half the storage for a wodge more cash. Arses.

4. How does one reset one’s mojo? Mine appears to be in a bit of a decline, in a sort of Victorian-lady-reclining-on-chaise-longue manner. I had all these good intentions about blogging more regularly, and maybe adding pictures more frequently, and getting more exercise (which is a whole nother post on its own, frankly, as I reach ever closer to Woman Mountain Status), and whatnot, and instead I am largely sitting here and thinking that ginger wine would seem to be in order.

Answers, anyone?

So, here we are in 2010 – how very nice it is to see you all, as it were. This evening, Quercus and I went out for a quick walk around the field behind the house – it has been very cold here in Devon, and the frost is thick enough on the ground that there are spikes of ice sticking out at outlandish angles from each blade of grass. We haven’t had snow, but the frost in the rising moonlight was crunchy underfoot, and the stars were bright overhead, and we are told that snow may even appear tomorrow or the day after.

Tomorrow is twelfth night, and this being one of the traditions that appears to have crept into our lives together, we will disband our Chrimbly tree, removing in the process the eighteen felted hearts and, er, one star that I managed to get stitched before giving up for this year; we went for the minimalist approach, using only the felty things, lights and some particularly attractive fircones as decorations. The good thing about losing the Christmas tree, which I am always sorry to see go, is that we will have serious floorspace available to us in the kitchen for the first time in aaaaages. Quercus has fitted oak worktops during the Christmas break, and we spent the days after New Year waxing them and polishing them with hard wax oil, a slightly confusing substance which behaves like neither wax nor oil, and which requires approximately half a decade to dry. Or go off. Or harden. Or whichever term implies best its ultimate, er, setting. Having worktops, together with cupboards underneath them, means the kitchen now resembles an Actual Proper Kitchen In Which Cooking Might Not Be Outlandish, particularly with a fitted oven! and a hob with wanky touch control thingies that neither of us really understands! to complement the cupboardage. Next up is a large oddly-spaced cupboard on the right-angled wall, but that’s sort of the next stage, so let us not get too ahead of ourselves, eh?

Largely, the festive whatsit was quiet and delightful this year. Notable exceptions to this rule went as follows:

- Quercus’s mother told him he needed a haircut as her opening greeting, literally as she walked through the back door (to which she goes automatically, and which she opens without knocking unless we, Lucia-like, thwart her Mapp-inspired progress by locking the door, something we delight in managing), which was particularly irritating as we had actually had a cut booked for him but the hairdresser had cancelled because she wasn’t very well. Also irritatingly, she told him his glasses need changing because they’re scratched; he’d been to the opticians the weekend previously and is awaiting new lenses as we speak.

- One of the presents she very kindly gave us was funds for a wooden hanging airer affair, the sort you suspend with cunning ropes and pulleys, shimmying it up somewhere nice and warm and OUT OF THE WAY whenever clothes have the temerity to need washing. We bought the blighter, and blow me if we didn’t fit it the very same day it arrived, largely in a bid to avoid our usual ‘oh yes – must do that sometime’ procedure, a well-rehearsed number which usually includes a six-month lead-time. So, there we were, congratulating ourselves on a job disgustingly well-done and with more promptness than is perhaps decent, when up pipes Quercus’s dear mother with ‘but of course the washing won’t actually DRY there, will it?’. No, because clearly the effect we were hoping for was not one of drying, but of an INDOOR WATERFALL, carefully crafted with prayers to the gods of wet laundry.

- Eclipsing any irritations offered by my delightful mother-in-law, however, was my experience of van versus elbow, which took place on Boxing Day. We (we being me, Quercus, his mum and the tiny daughter) went for a walk in glorious December sunshine. We followed the Highway Code, walking on the right side for the conditions and taking general note of any traffic around (which was not considerable, it being Boxing Day, and the lanes being tiny and icy) and wearing suitably bright clothing (in my case, because I am naturally colourful; in Quercus’s mother’s case, because other people’s retinas are there to be attacked). Unfortunately, this did not prevent a van driver hitting not one, not two, but three of us, though astonishingly, and hugely thankfully, the tiny daughter was completely unharmed. Quercus had a big bruise and two large grazes to show for it, and I had a partially dislocated elbow and a bruise the size of Calcutta which has yet to disappear. Stiffness, general aches and pains and the continued purpleitude are the ongoing whatsits at this point; for the other party, apparently either a mandatory driving improvement course and accompanying fine or prosecution is likely. We have litigiously engaged a personal injury lawyer.

The delightfulness still outstripped the moments of homicidal mania, however, particularly where the tiny daughter’s recent acquisition (a red rocking moose) was concerned. Other splendid moments were created by the rapid consumption of far too many mince pies (though I still find that the mince pie drawer remains reasonably empty,* in my case, begging the question as to whether or not one might find any more about the place…) and two entire trays of homemade Rocky Road (for which I blame Nigella Lawson, of whose work I had remained blissfully unaware prior to a moment of weakness in the few days before Christmas, and an unfortunate availability of her back catalogue on the Beeb’s iPlayer dooberry).

Also, and I feel this warrants an entry of its own, really, I found myself the recipient of the very best present I could have wished for, but wouldn’t have, not wanting to tempt fate: the witchling’s sleep has improved. We haven’t done anything horrid, and we didn’t end up night-weaning, but for the last couple of weeks, things have been much better. Of course, now that I’ve written that down and made whichever part of the universe which had until now been looking the other way, busily destroying nations and whatnot, I expect the attention will snap back this way and sleep will once more become but a distant memory, but I just wanted to record for posterity that things have been particularly lovely for a little while. Long may it last.

And you?

* I tend to think my stomach has various drawers, departments and other organisational sectors; sometimes, for example, the savoury drawer can be stuffed to capacity, while the sweet drawer is happy to accept four servings of pudding, a bar of chocolate, and the promise of a ruptured something-or-other still to come. Is this just me? I think not.

The aged parent has just departed after a very pleasant visit which would have been improved only by the absence of my wretched cough, now in its third week and countering attack from a second course of antibiotics and steroids. We are busy on the kitchen – Quercus is machining lengths of oak as I type, and we have the carcasses of the base units in place, together with the floors for them and the side panels which divide them in two and whatnot – and I’m not in a very writerly space as a result; mostly the witchling and I have been going out for lots of little walks (she walked about a mile the other day, and was still faintly protesty when I suggested that she might need carrying for a bit towards the end), doing ridiculously sticky activities involving glue and coloured paper and – in my less sane moments – glitter, and generally enjoying the best bits of winter together. I am also delighted to have found a picture I drew for her when I was pregnant – there was a gap on the page left for the baby’s name, as we didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl when I drew it – and have started to finish it off, using some v. gorgeous watercolour pencils I self-indulgently bought some time ago.

Other than that, it’s knitting (on the second sleeve of her cardigan now, and have done the fronts and the back), blanket-stitching felt hearts and stars to go on the Chrimbly tree (which is assuming we either rob a bank or steal one, frankly, given the prices they’re going for this year – they mostly seem to start at about £30 for six foot, which seems a tad scary…), and the continual dusting involved in woodworky things.

Egad.

In between colouring myself nearly entirely yellow courtesy of the yellow ochre which we’re using to colour the limewash (remind me to tell you about – wait for it: annual – and singular – scientific  term usage coming up – exothermic reactions sometime, by the way), I have also been revisiting the list of things I wanted to achieve in October. So far, so good, frankly! Here we are, midway through the month which marks properly the arrival of autumn, and today is the first time we’ve lit the stove this autumn. It’s been quite cold, but we are embracing once more the put-another-jumper-on approach, largely because, having run the stove for three years on free wood we’d collected from various people who didn’t want their spare trees and whatnot, we now find ourselves with a rather depleted woodpile. Of course, by most standards, it’s still a Pile Of Shame, but we can tell already that there isn’t enough wood there to get us through the entire winter unless we get back to scavenging on a reasonably regular footing. The thing with all this building work is that it knocks a lot of the things we have to do regularly to the back of the queue. Living in a house like this is not really a sit-back-and-do-nowt existence; the house needs a lot of work, and just to keep things from getting too damp in the changing months between true summer and genuine autumn, bearing in mind that the stove being our only source of heating – and an almightily ample one, at that - we have wood to source, and chop, and store. This means trolling around with the trailer and the chainsaw, and generally going where angels fear to tread in terms of where sane people would drive cars…  (Gratuitous fireplace picture, largely because I managed to hang those lanterns up today, having had the idea festering away at the back of the ol’ noggin for some weeks now; we used the lanterns, plus about fifteen of their friends and family, as table decorations for our wedding bash, nearly four years ago. Each time I light them, I hear a vague strain of chaotic folk music, and I smell the acrid smoke of outdoor fireworks, and I taste the sweetness of icing made by our cake-making helper, and I remember the brightness of Quercus’s smile as we danced in circles with a huge throng of our friends and family.)

We are also embarking on a little time-filler; you know, just the sort of thing to knock off in an afternoon when you’ve nothing else to do. Ahem. Yes. So. We’re building a barn. You know, as you do. And we’re attempting to make it from free timber. That whole project I described blithely as a woodshed.  So far, it’s not going too badly: we’ve got planning permission for it, Quercus having drawn up scale plans and whatnot, and we’ve specified a wooden frame with shingles (wooden tiles, effectively) on the outside, so the most important thing is that hopefully it’ll look like a giant fircone when it’s done. Um. Did I just type that out loud? I was trying to keep at least a thin veneer of serious adult concern over this one. We’ve been collecting pallets as a start – the idea is that Quercus will process them with one or other of the frankly disturbing quantity of giant saws he has accumulated during the extension build, leaving us with planks ready to be cut to shingle-like length, and off-cuts which, provided the wood is untreated, will feed the stove for a while. The only slight shadow on this particular horizon is that we worked out the other day that we probably need to find not one hundred, but probably three hundred pallets in order to get this barn off the ground. Current total? About thirty. (Maybe I should start Pallet Watch 2009, in a desperate bid to keep us motivated.)

I have finished the hat I was knitting for the tiny daughter (it matches the legwarmers I made her for Christmas last year; I can’t stop squeaking when I see her in them together, which those of you who know me personally will know is a distinctly unlikely reaction to one whose favourite word is probably ‘gruntfuttock’). (Picture of said hat to follow as soon as I work out how to distract the tiny daughter long enough to allow both the presence of said hat on the head, and the camera to be within [my] [exclusive] grabbing distance.) I’ve also gained another excuse to take the tiny daughter out for a walk around the lanes – someone might see her hat! and find it as charming as I do! Tiny legs sticking out of brown velvet sling on my back, tiny head whipping around as she peers over my shoulder, both swaddled in knitted confections. Happiness is not hard to come by with such things around the place. Mostly, we’re walking a couple of miles more afternoons than not, helped by the knowledge that when I’m really tired (did I mention the molar-cutting which has been going on at night chez nous? No? Well, that’ll be lack of sleep!) the best thing is normally to Go Out And DO SOMETHING, rather than sit here, flatly, attempting to remember which way is up.

Also, we have now got three coats of limewash on the outside of the house; the render is now protected from frost, and we’ll be happy if we go through the winter without adding any more washes. The colour is just divine – the sort of yellow which speaks – no, sings of golden sunshine, of warm autumn afternoons, and of the glorious and unexpected burst of colour to be found at the very tops of our seven-foot Jerusalem artichokes.

Next up, rosehip jam. We’ve just made our first batch of quince cheese, and it is every bit as lovely as the sample we were given by our friends the other week; I am freezing it in silicone moulds and then storing small whole cheeses for later in the year. Provided I can stop myself raiding the freezer in the quiet anonymity of the night.

So, that’s what’s going on around here. And you?

As I was walking across campus yesterday, looking at all the shiny happy faces of this year’s fresher intake (aged approximately fourteen), I realised it’s ten years this year since Quercus and I met. We were both going into our second year as undergraduates, and, for reasons which shall remain nameless, had opted to live in the soul-destroying self-catering apartments on offer at the back end of the university. (They’re at the back end for that very reason – even walking near those buildings, one risks succumbing to deep depression, and, believe me, the carpet choices (orange, fuzzy, prone to pilling) do little to improve one’s mood over the academic year, while the only appealing accommodation they afford is for the spiders who can fit themselves into the crevices between the unplastered breeze blocks which make up the walls.) Our official first-date anniversary is November 13, but it’s been sort of outshone by our wedding anniversary, only a few days later on November 19; I think we actually met on September 26.

The first time we met I was en route to Cornwall for a day-trip with a friend who lived upstairs, and Quercus was unloading an improbably large quantity of improbably large stereo equipment from an improbably small van. He says his impression was of something blonde, terrifying and talking far too fast scuttling past him; I thought he was interesting, in part because I’d had a feeling about him before we actually met. I knew pretty soon that he was going to be at the very least significant for me; our second conversation, which took place in the desultory kitchen and common room, was about Vaughan Williams, Debussy and Arnold Bax, and shortly afterwards he was delighted when I whistled ‘Song for my Father’ by Horace Silver. It was the first time I’d encountered someone who shared the same sort of interest in music, or had similarly bizarre tastes. About four weeks later, we went to the Double Locks fireworks party; I had had a bad dose of bronchitis and was feeling pretty grim, but when he asked, there was no way I wasn’t going.

By this time, we were in that exhilarating stage of will-we-won’t-we; we’d been spending increasingly large chunks of time together, and I could see that, if he was the person I thought he was, it could Really Work, As In Longer-Term. We’d had one excruciating late-night conversation where, lounging in my doorway, he’d verbalised his reasoning over some of my behaviour, coming to the conclusion that ‘well, that must mean that you like me’; I hadn’t denied it, so when he asked, a few days later, about this fireworks party, I felt certain that it was kind of now or never. We spent most of the evening with his friends, a little ahead of them for most of the few miles it took to get there, and just as I began to wonder if I’d got my wires not just crossed but knitted, I realised we’d ended up on our own again, and he turned to me and asked if it would be alright if he held my hand. We were both shaking; I was so nervous that I felt sure he could hear my heart thumping. By the end of that week, we were an established thing; I only realised then that we’d been the subject of a good bit of gossip for our flatmates, who were splendidly unsurprised at our union.

So, a decade on, and I still find myself smiling involuntarily when he smiles, still laugh when he tells me he has me in his evil clutches and gearboxes. I find myself in the happy position of being deeply, abidingly, stupidly, in love with my husband.

(I would put a picture of him up, but I think he might demur.)

Most of the time we spend the mornings together, just by ourselves. A lot of other daddies do not get the chance to do this, and I thought I’d write down how I feel.

You are 1; I am 29. You are 2’ 3”; I am Daddy-sized. You have wavy, very fair hair; I have chaotic, used-to-be-blonde hair which I sincerely hope you don’t inherit. You have shiny bright blue eyes, which peep out at me in the mornings; I have glasses which you attempt to destroy. You have 7 tiny, razor-sharp teeth which you sink into my finger when I least expect it; I have crooked fangs which you like to inspect from time to time.

You like cats and hens and other animals; I like it when animals don’t escape or vomit on the floor or bring a disembodied head in. You like Aelfric the owl, and Squirrel Nutkin and the sheep who vibrates; I like playing with your anthropomorphic friends, especially when they have furry tails or crunkly wings. You like being held upside-down and swung around madly; I like the baby-giggles this inevitably produces. You like sitting in the garden, plucking blades of exciting grasses and examining them in minute detail; I like it when you pick a daisy then turn and hand it to me. You like builders’ merchants, and tool hire places and scrap metal yards; I like it when we do these things together, and both marvel at a giant crane or a noisy machine or fiddly brass pneumatic parts. You like going to Music With Mummy; I like being the only Daddy there.

You are my baby-in-a-sling, my walking companion, my friend indoors and out. We trudge in all weathers up hills and through woods, looking and laughing at low branches which brush the tops of our heads as we pass. We stride together over windy moorland, you snuggled down with your little hat over your ears, safe and warm next to me as we troll along. You looking up at me in the sling as we hurdle a gate or trudge up some muddy path makes me realise how nice it is that you are right there with me, not in a pushchair going over concrete. Sometimes we sit side-by-side on a grassy hill and I look at the view while you inspect the grass. Sometimes it rains and we hide under the umbrella together.

We have done this since the start of June, and I love it. Well done my darling, my tiniest littlest.

So, cake:

Impromptu Ginger Cake

Ingredients
1 cup dark brown sugar

2 cups wholemeal self-raising flour

2 eggs

A good sprinkle of ginger; probably about a tablespoon 

About a mug of sultanas

A splosh of soya milk as needed

 
Then…
Entire lot in bowl; stir about with suitably nice-feeling wooden spoon, and whack it all in a loaf tin. Took about forty minutes on something like 200°c.

Still laying siege to house; render largely off the south wall now, but a bit of an evil job, all told, and we learn, not really to our surprise, that most of that wall has been reinforced (we assume) with bits and bobs of concrete blocks and old bricks, probably to effect a sort-of cob repair at some point. Of course, let us not speak of the fact that concrete eats away at the cob because it’s so bloody hard while cob is a soft material… We have decided that taking the render off is probably sufficient unto the day; it seems likely that replacing the bricks et al would necessitate major cob repairs (and probably exciting things like acro props, which, while fine in a let’s-be-really-paranoid-even-though-we-don’t-need-them way, are less fun when there’s a real chance that one’s house might collapse without their presence), and we’re not here forever… So, it’s lime rendering still, and patching-up of cob as necessary.

Quercus has a small scaffolding tower put up against one wall of the house, and armed with an intense frown and an SDS drill, he’s chiselling the render off, bit by bit. So far, we have most of the south wall clear, and some of the west, but we’ve also found that most of the west wall is covered with chicken wire underneath the render; not quite sure if that’s to give a key for the render on an otherwise very dusty surface, or because the cob was thought to be utterly buggered, but either way, preserving its presence seems a good idea. We’ll get more lime delivered next week, ironically just as our lane is closed for thirty-five days, which might make for some interesting manouevres on the part of the various drivers involved, and, possibly, on the part of any hedges foolish enough to put themselves in the way. (The lane closure is because the surface of the road has become, well, insubstantial, shall we say. There are potholes large enough to eat buses, and odd bumps which regularly cause cars to ground in the middle.)

Other than that, the Steiner School thing was thought-provoking, though I’m still not quite sure what I think (Steiner Schools: an interesting and informative alternative to mainstream education, or a bunch of smug lentil-eating tossers – discuss); the toddler group is over until next September, so we’ll figure out whether or not it’s something we want for the witchling over the summer, I suppose. In between trundling shitloads of rubble from one end of the garden to the other. Oh, and demolishing various sheds. And sorting the windows. And the buggered plasterwork. 

And buying another set of little lighties.

Because every house needs at least twelve sets of little lighties. 

Right?

… Right?

- The visit from the paternal relative (+ wife) went well; they both loved the witchling, and this resulted in lots of laughter, tickling, and general adoration, which the witchling lapped up. She was incredibly good-natured with her visitors, even managing a forty-minute car-drive home when she was really ready to sleep (she finds cars a bit too stimulating to sleep, generally, although she did nod off about five minutes from home, of course…) without a hint of displeasure, despite yawning her head off and clearly wanting some peace and quiet. We had a very nice time out in Totnes on Saturday; new dungarees were purchased for her from one of my very favourite clothes shops courtesy of the aged parent, and we had a gorgeous lunch in my favourite Totnesian eatery, Willow.  I am, however, cursing myself for not having bought a chest of drawers I saw at the market there – it was really quite good, and would have done for the space we have earmarked for drawers in the kitchen, but I sort of havered until we had to leave, and now I kick myself. However, a rootle in the shed later that day produced a forgotten demijohn of sloe wine; silver linings and all that. 

- An impromptu ginger cake I baked on Friday turned out particularly well; recipe to follow shortly.

- Quercus’s mother is here (the witchling is in danger of over-excitement at this rate, but we are off out together tomorrow on our own, just to give her some [I think much-needed] mama+babe time) and will stay until Thursday; on the plans – render preparation, garden organisation, door-finishing.

- Tomorrow the witchling and I are going to a Steiner School toddler group; I think it’s fairly safe to say that I am a thousand times more excited about it than she is!

You know how some days, the sun is shining, and the sky is blue, and a breeze blows in from the west, and things just feel right? Despite having woken up at five-something yesterday? And despite having spent quite a long time up to the elbows in semi-fermenting honeysuckle? Well, today is one of those days. Something has shifted for me in the last few days. I don’t quite know why, but it’s as if the energy around me has just altered for the better.

That’s really wanky, isn’t it? Sorry about that, but I can’t think of a better way to put it. I’ve been feeling stymied and tired and a little disgruntled for quite a while, in one way or another, for no reason other than just… because.

I think, for one thing, that having children of one’s own digs up, for me, a load of shite that would frankly be best left under the stone it previously relied on for cover; I’ve been introspecting to within an inch of my life, going over and over ground (my mother’s death, her illness, my father’s new relationship, my childhood, my father’s departure when I was a teenager and my mother was first ill) which is boring even to me. And now I think perhaps I am done with it. I think perhaps I am finally getting to the point where I can accept my father, and his involvement in my life (or lack thereof), for what he – and it – is: what he is, and what he can be at this moment. I am not his top priority, and I haven’t been for a long time. And that’s OK – I have priorities of my own these days, and Doc Witch’s post has just reminded me that actually, I chose this life, and I chose the things I do with it, and that any feelings of failure are created by measuring myself by other people’s standards or expectations, rather than because I’m actually fucking things up. So, yes: earwigs on the bathroom floor, grout which isn’t quite high enough, dead shrews littered artistically across the sitting room carpet, and a Baby Belling oven which is clearly sent from hell (along with a variety of mechanical and/or electrical fiends) – they are all part of this life that I have chosen. A life which includes a marriage I grew up thinking probably didn’t exist except in fairy stories (not that it’s fairy-tale, but, seriously, I do consider myself disgustingly fortunate in Quercus – I mean, as I write this, the man is going round the supermarket with the witchlet, picking up detergent, sugar for wine-making and whatnot, all having hung out the washing earlier this morning: what is not to like, I ask?), a child who makes me smile to myself in the middle of the night, a pair of cats who I adore (though don’t tell Wixon I said that; it’ll only encourage his twisted firestarter tendencies), a house which outwardly reflects so strongly who I feel myself to be (down-at-heel, but hopefully interesting nonetheless), and which Quercus loves as I do, and a life which, while there are still areas to work on, is, broadly-speaking, pretty damn good.

So here’s to taking ownership of one’s life, and of saying that the good stuff is all good, and the crap? Well, it’s transitory. (And sometimes, quite useful for comedy value.)

Sunday breakfasts are something to which I really look forward. Quercus and I have long enjoyed the delights of Riseholme scones (a pretentious name we created for sort-of drop-scones, made with self-raising flour and indecent quantities of seasoning, named after one of the deeply self-conscious villages E. F. Benson created in his Mapp and Lucia books), and in the last couple of years we’ve also discovered the fantasticness of granola. Particularly the Hollyhock variety, which I learned about courtesy of a nice stint on Cortes Island a couple of summers ago. This morning, we’re rediscovering muesli. Not that nasty dry stuff that comes in bags from the supermarket, though. Oh no. I remember when Quercus’s Cortesian aunt offered me muesli while we were staying with them (did I mention the fact that they had an outdoor, wood-fired hot-tub? WOOD-FIRED? HOT-TUB? There is just nothing wrong with those phrases, is there?) and I responded in a distinctly luke-warm manner, until I found myself asking what was causing the zesty smell of lemon that hovered nearly permanently in their kitchen. That would be the muesli then. This morning I whipped up a new batch. It involves grated apple, the zest of one or two lemons, cinnamon, almond slivers, coconut, natural yoghurt, soy milk, cranberries and a ton of oats. Ye gods, how is it possible that something so simple can smell so utterly deelish? Well, who cares, in short, as long as it does? 

This morning, breakfast was onion bagels, pieces of banana and camomile tea. The witchling likes variety, see? (Nappy rash still raging, incidentally, for those of you kind enough to comment; thanks for the suggestions – we’re taking her to see our doctor again tomorrow, but I’m not holding out much hope. The simple fact is that the disposables don’t make her sore, and the cloth do. Again with the pissed-offedness. I’ve also been making Doc Witch’s yoga cookies; full marks, is all I can say. Utterly moreish, and in a sort of ‘and I’m not even that bad for you’ way.  

The best part about Sunday breakfasts, you see, is that they normally take place over about the course of the entire morning, and are interspersed with lots of new pots of tea, coffee or chai being proffered, and various sit-down sessions, and the odd bit of playing on the floor, and then maybe a wander down the garden to feed the chucks some titbits, a conversation with a cat here and there, and maybe a spot of cooking for later in the day (today cookies, and the leg-work of a savoury tater bake thing for dinner later). Life is so fast, most days; we have to be a bit on the ball, especially as I am now working part-time, and quite a lot of our life falls into a sort of finely-tuned rhythm. Five mornings a week, from eight until twelve-thirty, I have my professional hat on, while Quercus has his Daddy hat on; come one o’clock, I return, armed with a bottle of expressed milk, and switch to my Mama hat, while Quercus pulls on his professional jacket and heads off to work until five-thirty or six, depending on how much he wants to work a four-day week. This bit is still in its infancy – I only started again on Thursday – but it does mean that we have to be in certain places, doing certain things, at certain times, where previously I’ve been floating about, as and when, hither and yon, and all that. So, all the more reason to celebrate Sunday mornings, and a return to the sanity of life as it happens, rather than life as other people demand it be. I think it’s important to really appreciate the times we get where we can do as we like, be what we want. All the more-so now we have the witchling; one of the things I hope she remembers when she’s older is that her childhood was not hurried – we made space and time to just be, whenever possible. So important, that. After all, what’s more important than wandering about with a baby peering over your shoulder from the comfort of a recently-acquired brown velvet sling, making cookies, swigging camomile tea? Nowt, I reckon.  

About a week ago, I came across Organix apple and plum cereal bars for small people; they are sort of like flapjacky things, but without sugar, or at least without sugar as sugar, if that makes sense. The sweetness comes from raisins and fruit concentrate. Anyhoo, the witchling nibbled one down quite cheerily and I realised that if she were to continue nibbling at that rate, we would soon need a second mortgage. So, I fiddled aboot a bit this weekend and came up with the following:

Flapjacky Whatsits
Get mits on:
A large handful of sultanas
A large splash of fruit juice concentrate (we had some of this one in; the large splash was probably about, say, ten tablespoons’ worth)
Probably about 5 oz of oats
Probably about 2 oz plain wholemeal flour
A grabbing of dessicated coconut (and by grabbing, I mean a fistful, I suppose)
A splash of sunflower oil (say, five tablespoons’ worth)

Then…
Blend the sultanas together with the juice concentrate and the oil, then whack the other stuff in and mix it all together into a reasonably flapjack-like consistency; I threw in a bit more oil and a few more oats here and there, just to get it to the right whatsit. Then stick it in some sort of tray (I used a rather odd little muffin tray thing that I found in the back of the cupboard, looking rather forlorn), and bake the bugger for about twenty minutes at 180°c. I was very surprised by how well the first attempt turned out; definitely means I won’t buy the Organix ones again, as lovely though they are, they’re also £2.65 or something similarly hideous.

Somehow this week has been quite busy; I’ve been drafting two articles for this and that, and sorting out things like applications to go part-time (Quercus), as well as going in to work for half a day, which felt very strange after so long away, and not entirely good, predictably. I don’t really want to go back; people keep telling me that I’ll enjoy the adult company (they’ve obviously never worked in an IT-related job…) and it’ll do me good – I remain unconvinced thus far. We’ll see, I guess. It’s a necessary evil given the £6000-odd I’d have to repay in maternity money otherwise, but it didn’t make it any easier to leave the witchling, even though it was Quercus who was looking after her.

Right – must go and rootle pizza out of the oven; tonight: sweetcorn, mushroom, pepperoni, various bits and bobs of cheese, and the essential ingredient – sunflower seeds.

Hello. Quercus here.

I have comandeered the little white box with tiny keys for the purpose of writing about recent events. Dr. EW and the Witchlet have been in Sussex since Thursday, being looked after by my own dear mother in her house of utter cleanliness and order. I think this was probably a very good idea as the water pipes freezing did seem to be the final straw. Poor Dr. EW – she has has a lot on her plate recently and could do with a bit of centrally-heated care and food not cooked on a Baby Belling.

Things have been moving on a little at this end. The plumbing pipes did eventually defrost, and thankfully there were no leakages due to the fact that all our pipes are plastic. Lovely David (who called him that? I mean, really…) has even got the hot water working again, solving a nasty airlock problem by joining the hot and cold pipes together to use the mains pressure to flood the system again. All very technical, but it works now. The best bit really is that the bit that froze was not where we thought it was – we had thought it must be the bit of plumbing that goes in the ceiling (it is all hidden in the depth of our timber-framed walls, but over the door and windows it hitches itself up into the roof) but actually it was a bit which was left uninsulated where our power cable came in. So that’s all good really.

Lovely David is now finishing off the electrics. We really value this because a) it means we will have lights in our kitchen for the first time (hoorah!), b) we can get it all signed off as legitimate for the kind building regulations gentleman and c) it’ll be one less thing to worry about. Huzzah! We have plumped for those lights you get on a stringy thing, because they look fairly unobtrusive and were very cheap in our local Wickes store. Funny place, Wickes – I never really go there but when I do I always find something I hadn’t expected to see there, or something very cheap, or both.

The piece de resitance though is the fact that we now HAVE A BACK DOOR. Did I mention that we have a back door? A proper one. Let me expand on this a little. When we started building our extension in May 2008 we built the new, larger building up around the outside of the existing one. This enabled us to retain our old kitchen and bathroom while building chaos reigned only feet outside. Holes were dug and foundations laid, walls erected and Quercuses worn down by toil. When we got to a certain point we had to demolish our kitchen to make way for a new wall, and the bathroom hung on like a snail on the edge of a cliff while all around builderly things went on. Then came the day when the bathroom was taken apart brick by brick with a small but serviceable sledgehammer, and the new building outside revealed. Of course this was challenging because only the bare structure was there, and no door or windows were present. The door from the main bit of our house to the old kitchen effectively became our back door, the line between inside and out, even though it had no lock. We lived open to all for a while. Then some clever person who was not me decided to get the old back door and jimmy it into place in the new location, blocking up holes in the sides roughly with wood offcuts. A need for a catflap was identified after our furry companions were seen heading for the local chippy, and shortly after a cat-sized hole was cut in the door, complete with ears. And so it was for some time. Windows were fitted and eventually sealed tight, and render on the outside provided futher protection from the elements. Months elapsed and as winter came an artic gale blew through the kitchen door.

So this is why Dr. EW will be very pleased when she escapes from my maternal relative on Monday and returns home to find her new back door. She does not know anything about it, and as she has no internet access in Sussex, them being very backward there like, you are privileged to hear the news first. The new door was found in a reclamation yard (Toby’s in Newton Abbot, since you ask). It was supposed to be a stable door but there has obviously been a lack of interest from equine consumers in recent years, for out of over 2000 doors in the yard not one was of that sort. I know. I looked at them all. Many of the reclaimed doors were in poor condition with a bit of rot or mildew, and hardly any seemed to fit our short, fat doorway. Many were the wrong size to an extent that could not be fixed; others were just plain hideous. I thought a good second to a stable door would be to have a door with glass in the top, so that we can easily see down the communal tip that is our garden and into the field to the side. I looked at the glazed doors, but what you seem to pay for is the glazing and not the door itself, and mostly the glazing was broken or hideous). Many had only a small pane, and I fancied something with a large bit of glass. Eventually I realised that I was due very shortly to see a nursery which the Witchlet may attend, and that this place was some distance from the charming (not) town of Newton Abbot, so I had better make my mind up pronto and hotfoot it back, seeing how fast the car would go with a trailer on the back (about 120mph officer…) (I jest).

In the end I chose a solid old chunky door. It had obviously been an internal door and had no glazing, but I bought it for £60 and am in the process of making it into a rather nice back door. I have removed the top panel and a nice piece of double glazing is on order, to be installed when it arrives. The rest has been sanded and will get a good dose of wood filler. It has been chopped to size and tomorrow I’m finishing fitting the frame and lock. Frames and the like do take me ages to get right, but I want it done and dusted for when Dr. EW gets back on Monday. It even has a catflap now, so the furry felines won’t have to hitch a lift to the chip shop.

There we go then. Dr. EW reports, wheezily, that life in Sussex would be better without a horrible cough and a very little girl who has been VERY CROSS today.

Cheerio,

Quercus.

(‘Bits and bats’ comes from my ex-supervisor. Do you know, it’s been over two weeks and the knowledge that he is now my ex-supervisor still hasn’t quite sunk in. It is just too fantastic to be true.

Anyhoo.)

I’ve started redrafting some of my archives from the ol’ blog, so cunningly back-dated posts will be appearing in the archive list here too, making me feel less fly-by-night here. It’s funny, reading back over things I wrote over four years ago, and I was sorry not to have my back story, as it were, when I moved blogs, so in a way, the demise of Journalspace has resolved one or two things for me, I suppose; I hadn’t wanted to get rid of my presence there after I’d moved because I thought it would make it pretty obvious that I’d moved elsewhere, when what I wanted was for anyone reading to think that I might just have stopped. Or is that just my twisted psychology? Anyway, rhetoric, rhetoric. I’m particularly glad, in a sort of masochistic, pokey-stick-in-eye way, that reposting things is giving me the opportunity to use categories for things like recipes; most of the time, I’m quite happy posting in a completely unstructured chaos of tripe-like witterings free-flowing manner which scorns the restrictions of style and the petty boundaries of organisation, but it has dawned on me from a few questions people kindly left after I moved blogs that it would be handy to be able to lay my hands on certain entries without having to remember which sodding keyword works best in the as-yet-untried search box in the sidebar. (The JS one was surprisingly good, but I haven’t had chance to fiddle with the WordPress one yet.) It also means that you, gentle reader, are in the much improved situation of not needing to know how my tortured soul works when it comes to retrieving something you might have found interesting – you can just click on the ‘Provender’ thingy, and baddabing! there it will be. (Or not. I am not 100% on remembering to add the sodding category, now that I’ve got them there, all shiny and new and organised. See? It’s clearly an EBSAC error. Also known as ‘error between seat and computer’. Just no accounting for it.)

In other bits and bats, the new chooks are settling well. As soon as I complete my highly technical camera repair (i.e. the bit of blu-tack holding the lens cover open needs rewedging), I shall take some pics of them. We have plumped for Nightshade and Cobweb. Did I already tell you that? Possibly.

In still other news, Quercus and I spent about ten days around Chrimbly feeling really grim – we succumbed to a rather unpleasant ‘flu-like thing within twenty-four hours of each other, allowing just enough time for me to endure the hell of pre-Christmas ‘quick! a year-long siege is about to take place! pile your trolley high because NOTHING WILL BE LEFT! and the shops will never re-open!’ supermarket shopping with the witchling in tow – my, how we laughed. The good bit was that the witchling didn’t catch it, despite us both hacking all over the place around her. We washed hands every other second, and generally tried not to breathe on her, but still, my hopes weren’t high, so I was delighted that she managed to remain in rude health. (Did I mention that her current reaction to the sight of her grandmother is to raspberry, before chortling in the manner of Sid James?) The decidedly unfunny part of this tale is that we have now shaken said evil ‘flu-like thing off (and to an extent I can’t really complain: this is the first evil ‘flu-like thing (shall we go to EF-LT now, for ease of typing?) we’ve had for four years, though its timing, which, I think you’ll grant, was rather regrettable, does get it extra points, I feel) only to find that, just as the cough begins to wheeze its last, Quercus has developed a new and just as exciting version for Round II. He is now languishing in bed. Quercus does not do Man ‘Flu, either – he is disgustingly healthy, generally, and laughs in the face of coughs and colds which would floor your average chap. If I wasn’t married to him, I would find this level of health positively affronting; as it is, I merely thank the gods that it means we don’t catch every single thing which makes its way through his colleagues. But if he’s got it, I think, sadly, that we’re in the countdown to me getting it. I am making Desperation Soup now, just in case.